


White, Red, Gold

by MaudlinScientist



Category: Better Call Saul (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-08
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:54:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25138789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaudlinScientist/pseuds/MaudlinScientist
Summary: White car, red shirt, gold light. Set shortly after "Something Unforgiveable."
Relationships: Jimmy McGill | Saul Goodman/Kim Wexler
Comments: 11
Kudos: 43





	White, Red, Gold

“So?” asked Kim.

“I was thinking more the Esteem Part Two. Something, you know, practical.”

“But you _want_ this one, right?”

The Cadillac was like something out of an old movie—white against the black asphalt of the lot. It drew attention to itself, even among all the other cars; it seemed to say… something (maybe just “I’m saying something.”) Marco would have loved it.

Jimmy swallowed. “It’s just… the money.”

“We’ll make money,” said Kim. And there it was again. That calm confidence, just like in the hotel the night before last, and though now she was in her work clothes with her hair up and the sun shining on her face the set of her eyes was exactly the same. She’d been calm and confident for as long as Jimmy had known her, of course, but this was different. Deeper, maybe.

It occurred to him that she was only a little older than he had been when he came to Albuquerque, determined to stop slippin’ and become someone new. What had Kim decided to become? And would she be better at transforming than Jimmy had been? She was better at most things.

She was already waving the salesman over. It was a twenty-something kid in a corporate-logo polo, and as he approached them Kim leaned closer to Jimmy and said in a low voice, “Give him an offer.”

And so he did. For a terrible moment he thought it was going to be like his last day in court, trying to negotiate but flailing, failing at one of the only things he was good at. But then Kim touched the back of his elbow, lightly, with just the tips of her fingers, and he could feel the parts of himself that had been falling apart draw back together again. This _was_ what he was good at—making a deal, the push and pull and slip and slide of it. By the time he was pulling out of the dealership, glancing over at Kim in the passenger seat and seeing her smile back at him, he felt better than together: he felt energized. His electricity was flowing for the first time since the desert.

It felt so good to want something and then actually get it.

As he drove home, Kim flipped through radio stations until she found one playing her kind of music: pop music, but, like, _classy_. Jimmy preferred the classic rock station, but it was okay because Kim started to hum along to the music and then she kicked off her shoes and put her feet up on the dash—and that was perfect, a barefoot girl was exactly what this car had been missing. 

But as he turned into the lot in front of their apartment building, he started to feel the energy drain back out of him. The last spark left him as he pulled into his spot and shut the engine off.

“Kim,” he said to stop her from getting out of the car. She had just barely finished getting her shoes back on and turned to him, cocked her head to the side—her listening look.

“I was thinking maybe… maybe _I’ll_ make money and I’ll just… give it to you.” He only paused for a moment before realizing he didn’t want her to say anything yet, and more words spilled out of him. “So you don’t have to worry about that, at all, and you can concentrate on being a crusader for justice. And I know I freaked out when you first told me you gave up Mesa Verde and I wasn’t as supportive as I should have been, but honestly that was mostly low blood sugar talking. You’ll be great. It’ll be great. I wanna help.”

Kim stared at him for a long moment. “You’re going to make enough money to support two legal practices?”

“… Yeah.”

“How are you going to do that, Jimmy?”

And he had no answer, because they both knew he couldn’t wring that kind of money out of petty criminals.

But maybe… maybe he _could_ go back to the cartel. If he were more careful, if he stuck strictly to lawyer-type activities, if he made the right allies. Who would be in charge with Lalo gone—Nacho Varga? Nacho was scary, but he wasn’t a Salamanca, and that had to count for something.

“I’m going inside.” At the sound of Kim’s voice, Jimmy’s thoughts snapped off. How could he have been thinking of the cartel when she was right there in front of him, all calm and not-nearly-afraid-enough and _hurtable_?

Instead of following her right away, he waited in the car and watched Kim head up to their apartment—watched her ponytail swinging behind her head, her legs moving in her pencil skirt, her sharp shoes clicking against the steps. It was just so _obvious_ that she belonged far away from here and him. She belonged at the tops of tall buildings, in the places where money sluices around and leaves a shine on everything.

Once the shock of the last few days wore off, she’d remember that. He was almost sure.

***

He had to go into court. There was no other option at this point—after he had bombed so badly against Oakley he’d managed to reschedule everything for the next two days, but now he had to get back to work, keep his clients happy, get paid. Besides, he thought it would be better today—his sunburn had reached the itchy-rather-than-painful stage, and his mind felt less strung out and frayed. He was even looking forward to driving his new car to the courthouse.

He took out a black suit, red shirt, gold tie and tossed them on the bed. He’d just finished buttoning his pants and turned to the bed to grab the shirt when he saw that it had disappeared. A moment later he noticed a flash of red through the half-open bathroom door.

Kim was standing in front of the bathroom mirror wearing his shirt, which on her was long enough to be a short dress. She’d only done a few of the buttons, enough to keep it together, and her hair was still down, the red making it look extra yellow where it spilled over her shoulders. Her hands grabbed the edge of the counter, and she seemed to be examining her reflection very intently.

Jimmy leaned against the doorframe. “So this is interesting, but is there any particular reason…”

She turned to him, quirking an eyebrow. “Interesting, huh?”

He glanced down at her bare legs, pale against the vibrant color of the overlarge shirt. “ _Very_ interesting.”

She shrugged. “I was just thinking… I’m pretty sure I haven’t worn red since I was thirteen years old.”

“That’s a long time.”

“When I was a teenager, I guess I decided that red wasn’t serious enough, or would mean that I was trying to look… well, ‘sexy’,” (Jimmy could hear the sarcasm quotes, and remembered Kim wrinkling her nose as she told him how much she hated the word) “or even just like I wanted people to look at me.”

She paused, pursing her lips, and then said, “And also my mom had this red dress that was just horrible, way too tight, too… Anyway, she saw me looking at her in it once and offered to give it to me. She thought I _liked_ it.” Kim shook her head, a gesture Jimmy recognized from the other rare occasions when she’d brought up her mother, and which meant she was moving on.

“It was all just so... My whole adult life I’ve dressed for what I wanted people to think about what I thought about what they thought about me. Never about what I want _wanted_ to wear, what I liked _myself_ in.”

“So do you?” asked Jimmy. “Like yourself in red?”

“I can’t tell.” She gestured at the mirror. “That’s what I was trying to figure out.”

“You know… Influencing what other people think of you _is_ part of the point of clothes. That’s why kings wear furry capes.”

“Yes. And the people whose thoughts I cared about were… _Howard Hamlin._ And Chuck. And all the Hamlin-ettes and sub-Chucks. That’s who I was thinking of whenever I bought new clothes. For years.”

“It worked,” said Jimmy. “I mean, not just the clothes. All those people—that type of people—love you. They think you’re wonderful and talented and all-around great.” Even Chuck had respected and admired Kim... until she chose to stick with Jimmy. He felt a tiny twinge of guilt, remembering that. Not much. A mosquito bite’s worth of guilt.

Kim nodded. “And all it took was two decades without…” She waved her hands to communicate everything she had gone without doing, but then summed it up with “…wearing red.”

Jimmy took that in. He was curious about everything she’d ever wanted to do but hadn’t. He wondered if she wanted new things, now, or if old wants were swimming to her surface. “What happened to green?” he asked.

“What?”

“You used to wear more green.”

“Used to… as in ‘mailroom’ used to?”

“Yeah. You had this one sweater, it was that pale green—what-do-you-call-it—seafoam?”

She frowned slightly, as if trying to connect what he had said to her own recollection. “Was that… that sweater I wore over button-ups, like a librarian? That thing was so cheap it wore out in like a year. You remember _that_?”

He nodded. “I remember.”

_He remembered:_

_He noticed the sweater because it was something Cindy would never, ever wear, and that was back when beautiful women still made him think about Cindy. Kim wore it once every couple of weeks during Jimmy’s first winter in Albuquerque._

_She was wearing it the first time Jimmy ever made her laugh._

_She was so quiet, so careful and controlled, so focused even on repetitive mailroom tasks Jimmy found insufferably boring, he’d assumed she couldn’t have much of a sense of humor. But if he thought of something funny he wasn’t going to not say it just because whoever he was with wouldn’t sufficiently appreciate his wit, so one day when it was just the two of them in the mailroom assembling binders he said… God, he couldn’t remember. But whatever it was, she laughed._

_It was almost shocking, how the sound cracked her quiet. He swung his head around to look at her and she turned her face away from him, put a hand to her mouth to block her smile from view. And in an instant the seething tangle of_ wants _inside of him shifted and stretched to make room for brand new ones:_

_He wanted to make Kim Wexler so happy she had to hide her smile. He wanted to make her make sounds._

“Would you like it if I wore more green?” asked Kim.

He blinked, pulling away from the memory. “I don’t think that’s our vibe, me telling you what I’d like you to wear.”

“Oh? What’s our ‘vibe,’ then?”

“Our vibe is you wear what you want.”

She smirked. “Good answer.”

He stepped into the bathroom, then, and put his hands on her thighs. He slipped his fingers under the bottom edge of the red shirt, rubbed his thumbs against her skin.

She smiled and stood up on her toes and kissed him, but it was only a small smile and a small kiss, and she put her hand on his chest to keep him from pulling her closer. “What time do you have to be at court?”

“No time, never, what’s ‘court’?”

She laughed. “How about you go to work, and then tonight…”

“Hmm?”

“Tonight I try on one of your green shirts.”

***

_He dreamed:_

_The golden gun, the blood, the noise, the blood, the blood, the noise._

_And there was Kim, golden-haired and dressed in red. She walked through the gunfire as if she didn’t even see it, as if she had no clue how wrong it was for her to be here, to be anywhere near here. She knelt down beside where he cowered on the ground. “Jimmy.”_

“Jimmy.”

He jerked, spasming awake. It took a moment for it to sink in that he was home, in bed, and then a moment later he was terrified that he had hit Kim in his flailing. He turned over to see her lying on her side facing them, though he couldn’t quite make out the look in her eyes—the dim golden light filtering through the curtains highlighted her hip and shoulder, but the shadow from his body covered the rest of her.

“Should I not wake you when you’re having a bad dream?” she asked in a low voice.

He almost laughed. “You should be getting your own sleep, Kim. You should…” He could feel words rising hot in his throat, and he knew she wouldn’t like them but he said them anyway. “You should have left me when you wanted to.”

She sighed, and the edge of her breath brushed against his face. “I never _wanted_ to, Jimmy. That was the whole point.”

He leaned forward, through the shadows between them, and kissed her.

She reached up and grabbed his hair— _and oh god once he lost the rest of his hair he’d never be able to feel that again._ She pulled him closer to her, and he didn’t know what she had decided to turn into and he didn’t know whether it was his fault and he didn’t know if she was seething with new wants or old ones and he didn’t know if she’d regret it when she got them.

“Kim?” he whispered

“Hmm?”

He breathed in deep, focused on the slight pressure of her nails on his scalp, on her eyes. What he knew is that they were on a road together, racing into the dark.

“Let’s make money.”


End file.
